Paper Presented at the International Classification Conference, St Andrews University,
July 2011-06-22
Introduction: Bourdieu and the Geometric Analysis of Data
Michael Grenfell
Trinity College,
University of Dublin, Ireland
NOTES TOWARDS A PAPER: PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE
WITHOUT PERMISSION
Introduction
Graphic representation of data.
Qualitative v. quantitative.
‘a science of existential analytics’
‘To crush one’s rivals’.
Those that can do MCA do not understand Bourdieu, and those that understand
Bourdieu cannot do MCA.
Since this is a Classification Conference:
Adjectives and Classification – piece from Distinction
Those who classify themselves or others, by appropriating or classifying
practices or properties that are classified and classifying, cannot be unaware
that, through distinctive objects or practices in which their powers are
expressed and which, being appropriated by and appropriate to classes, classify
those who appropriate them, they classify themselves in the eyes of other
classifying (but also classifiable) subjects, endowed with classificatory schemes
analogous to those which enable them more or less adequately to anticipate their
own classification’ (Distinction, 484)
Structural Relations
The basis of Bourdieu’s science is the simple fact of a coincidence between an
individual’s connection with both the material and the social world. Everything lies in
this connection: here are the structures of primary sense, feeling and thought – the
intensional links that are established between human beings and the phenomena –
both material and ideational – with which they come in contact. Everything we know
about the world is both established and developed as a consequence of individual acts
of perception. However, these structures have defining principles which are both preconstructed and evolving according to the logic of differentiation found within the
social universe. In other words, such principles do not exist in some value-free
Platonic realm; rather, they are the product and process of what already-has-been –
values which serve the status quo and/or emerging social forms. This
phenomenological structural relation is a product of environmentally structural
conditions which offer objective regularities to guide thought and action – ways of
doing things.
These objective and subjective bases to Bourdieu’s theory of practice can also be
illustrated by his understanding of culture. Bourdieu writes that there are two
traditions in the study of culture: the structural tradition and the functionalist one
(1968). The structuralist tradition sees culture as an instrument of communication and
knowledge, based on a shared consensus of the world (for example, the anthropology
of Lévi-Strauss). The functionalist tradition, on the other hand, is formed around
human knowledge as the product of a social infrastructure. The sociology of both
Durkheim and Marx would form part of this second tradition, as both are concerned
with ideational forms emergent in the structures of society – material, economic,
organisational – one being positivist and the other critical-radical. As noted above,
Bourdieu criticises both traditions. The first tradition is too static for Bourdieu:
structured structures taken as synchronic forms, and often based on primitive
societies. Whilst the second tradition reifies ideology – as a structuring structure – in
imposing the ideology of the dominant class in the Critical tradition, or maintaining
social control in the Positivist one. Bourdieu attempts to reconcile these two
traditions by taking what has been learnt from the analysis of structures as symbolic
systems in order to uncover the dynamic of principles, or logic of practice, which
gives them their structuring power (see Bourdieu 1971b). In short, a theory of
structure as both structured (opus operatum, and thus open to objectification) and
structuring (modus operandi, and thus generative of thought and action).
In the Outline to a Theory of Practice (1977/72), Bourdieu sets this out in terms of a
series of ‘breaks’: from empirical knowledge; from phenomenological knowledge;
from structural knowledge; and from scholastic (theoretical) knowledge itself (pp.12). These breaks should not be seen as a series of exclusions; rather each theoretical
position is retained and integrated into an overarching theory. In effect, we might
understand these breaks as implying the addition of a fourth type of theory –
structural knowledge – to the three previously identified in the triangle above). These
forms of knowledge are presented as a tetradic model in figure 10.1: as different types
of knowledge recognised in ethnographic practice:
The key to the integration of these theoretical breaks is the addition of structural
knowledge in relationship to the phenomenological, scientific and practical in order to
indicate their essential structural nature. Indeed, we might say of such structural
knowledge that it arises from practical action – that is the empirical cognitive acts of
individuals in pursuit of their aims. Such an engagement involves a social context and
individual agency – in Bourdieusian terms, field and habitus. However, it is important
to understand it as an essential constructivist aspect of human praxis – and from birth.
Several epistemological principles follow from this account:
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That the primary cognitive act (i.e. that of a newborn child) takes place in a
social environment and is essentially structural as it sets up intentional (what
phenomenologists refer to as intensional) relations between the social agent
and the environment;
That environment includes both material and ideational structures;
That the primary cognitive act therefore needs to be understood in terms of a
search for social-psychic equilibrium, or control over Self, Objects and
Others;
That such an act – and subsequent acts – do not establish themselves in a value
neutral vacuum, but in an environment saturated with values and ways of
seeing the world;
That such values and such ways constitute a pre-set orthodoxy into which
agents are inducted;
That such values and orthodoxies are dynamic and constantly evolving.
However, their underlying logic of practice remains the same: they represent a
certain way of seeing the world on the part of particular social factions of
society;
That way of seeing the world conditions and shapes the primary cognitive act
in a dynamic relationship with individuals involved. In this way, individuals
can be particular all whilst sharing commonalities with those immediately in
their social environment;
Both the particulars and the commonalities develop ‘dispositions’ to think and
act in certain ways. The extent to which such dispositions are ‘fired’ depends
on patterns of resonance and dissonance set up in the range of contexts in
which individuals find themselves;
The characteristics of orthodoxies, dispositions, and their underlying values
are defined by the position particular social grouping hold in relation to other
social groupings in the social space as a whole;
That position is also structural and relational;
Orthodoxies, values and dispositions express certain interests - those of the
most dominant social groupings;
In this way, there is a dialectical relationship between actual structures of
social organisation and the structures of symbolic systems that arise from
them;
Nothing is pre-determined; everything is pre-disposed.
Substantive and Relational Thinking
‘(The former) is inclined to treat the activities and preferences specific to certain
individuals or groups in a society as a certain moment as if they were substantial
properties inscribed once and for all in a sort of biological cultural essence’
(Practical Reason: 4)
To see them relationally, on the other hand, is to see them as understandable in
terms of social spaces, positions and relationships.
Disposition is a good example: they are not actual, hidden entities but only exist
in as much as they are part and parcel of social and psychological structures in
their mutually constituting existence…they are ‘energy matrices’ in that they are
constituted in the process of socialisation of individuals and lay in the structural
generative schemes of thought and action, which are activated in particular
social conditions – fields.
‘the real is relational: what exists in the social world are relations – not
interactions between agents or intersubjective ties between individuals, but
objective relations which exist ‘independently of individual consciousness and
will’, as Marx said.’ (Invitation: 97)
Language and Concepts
Field and Habitus
Not context and agency
Capital
The concept of capital is a good example of the relationship between Bourdieu’s
theory and his empirical data. He argued repeatedly that he never ‘theorised’ as such,
and any project to construct theory was anathema to him. Rather, he saw theory and
the concepts it implicated as necessary to an explanation of the links and relations he
found in his immersion in and analysis of the data collected. Both The Inheritors
(1979a/64) and Reproduction (1977/72) are examples of the way Bourdieu collected
data first and then developed theoretical statements to explain the relationships he
found in it. From his earliest work in Algeria and the Béarn (for example, 1958,
1962), Bourdieu was aware of the role that ‘culture’ played as a determinant factor in
the way people responded to their surroundings; in other words, their cultural
background partly shaped what they thought and how they acted. However, by the
time he came to undertake his research on education, this understanding was
developing into the fully fledged concept of cultural capital. Bourdieu later explained
that the term was: ‘intended to account for otherwise inexplicable differences in the
academic performance of children with unequal cultural patrimonies and more
generally, in all kinds of cultural and economic practice’ (2005/2000: 2). He
identified there three principal forms of cultural capital: an ‘embodied state’ – for
example, a person who has a certain accent and moves in a certain way according to
lasting dispositions; an ‘objective state’ – paintings, books, dictionaries, machines,
instruments, etc.; and an ‘institutional state’ – certificates, diplomas, success in
competitive selection (see Bourdieu, 1979b). However, the full sense of capital can
only be grasped as part of Bourdieu’s overall Field Theory; it is not simply a useful
economic metaphor. For Bourdieu, Capital is the currency of the Field: it fuels its
operations and defines what is included and excluded from it; it is the means by which
field products and processes are valued and not valued; and defines how those present
in the Field need to accrue status and/or power in order to exert control over it. It is
the basis of distinction on which human practice is predicated. It is also the medium
of communication between Field and Habitus, and of the ‘ontological complicity’ that
exists between them (see Bourdieu, 1982: 47). It is unsurprising (although apparently,
little understood up until the 1970s) if, in a Field such as education, certain
certificates and certain ways of thinking and doing things (Cultural Capital) were and
are valued over others; although the extent to which this is true clearly varies over
time and place, and educational sector. What cultural capital does is also to connect
education with other Fields; for example, the cultural Field of art, museums, etc. and,
ultimately, money wealth (it is not coincidental that while working on education,
Bourdieu was concurrently researching the cultural field. See 1990a and 1990b).The
main principle behind the concept of cultural capital then is that it embodies or
transmits the logic of practice of the Field in a way which differentiates and therefore
establishes hierarchies. In an ideationally-grounded Field - such as education - it is
consistent with its nature that cultural capital should be the dominant ‘currency’ of its
modus operandi. Such is not the same for all Fields; for example, in the Field of
commerce where money wealth might dominate. Concepts for other forms of capital economic and social - grew out of this original insight (see, for example,1984/79: 114
and 1986). If cultural capital consists of cultural attributes, including educational, and
economic capital is money wealth, social capital1 is defined as:
…the sum of current and potential resources which are linked to
possession of a network of lasting relations, of more or less
institutionalised shared acknowledgement and recognition; or, in other
words, belonging to a group, as the sum total of agents who not only share
the same characteristics (liable to be perceived by an observer, by others
and themselves) but also joined by permanent and useful connections.
(Bourdieu, 1980: 2)
Bourdieu in the Field – the Study of Social Grouping
In another publication (Grenfell, 2004) I have evoked the image of Bourdieu the
photographer as a way of understanding his own ‘gaze’ on the social world. I argue that,
for Bourdieu, very often, a single image is the source of his investigations. Two such
images are particularly striking. The first is from Algeria where Bourdieu first went in
1955 in order to complete his military service. It was a turbulent time of ‘troubles’ and
Algeria was engaged in a cruel war of independence with the occupying French
colonialists. Besides the profound changes in the structure of the population which had
been brought about by France since it first occupied Algeria in 1830, new displacements
had taken place as a result of war and the fight for independence. Here, Bourdieu saw a
society in turmoil: the old traditional way of life was being displaced by modern urban
living; the peasant economy was submerged in new capitalist systems; the agricultural
peasant was confronted by a growing industrial workforce. Amongst all these changes,
and the images to which they gave rise (see Bourdieu, 2003), one seems to have struck
Bourdieu as particularly telling. It is the photo of the modern salesman, one who literally
carried his shop on his bike (ibid.: 165). The second image comes from Bourdieu’s home
region in the Béarn. Here, a simple village ball with the village gathered for its Christmas
dance; and around the dance floor, the middle-aged bachelors who watch but do not
dance – the ‘unmarried’ and the ‘unmarriable’. In both cases, I argue, there is the gaze of
Bourdieu – both as photographer and sociologist – and the implied questions: Who are
From this point, I shall use social capital in italics to designate Bourdieu’s highly specific version of the
concept and ‘social capital’ to refer to its more general sense the literature. I adopt a similar approach to
terms such as ‘field’ and ‘capital’.
1
these people? What made them? What are their motives? What will become of them?
(see Grenfell, 2004: 34 and 119; Grenfell, 2006). It is in addressing these questions, and
unpacking the multidimensional factors at play, that Bourdieu constructed his sociology.
The ‘bal des célibataires’ was to occupy him for the next 30 years with substantial
reworkings of the data in papers in 1962, 1972, and 1989. And, Algeria was to furnish
him with enough material to draw on, not only for his early works on the ethnography of
this country, but also formed the basis of his major methodological statements: Esquisse
sur une théorie de la pratique (1972) and Le sens pratique (1980). In a sense they never
left him, and he returned again and again to these early field work experiences. These
two topics, perhaps more than any others, support Bourdieu claim to have only
published the ‘work of his youth’!
The substantive points I am wishing to make here are as follows. Firstly, Bourdieu
begins with a practical context – an image, sometimes a social entity – and uses this to
conduct his enquiries. Data is collected first, and only then is theory developed after
immersion in its analysis. This is a necessary first stage if he is to make a ‘rupture with
the pre-constructed’. He says so: in interviews I conducted with him (Bourdieu and
Grenfell, 1995), he describes the main motive for studying and publishing analyses on
Algeria as the desire to elucidate a topic that was poorly understood by the majority of
French men and women. Similarly, his work on education came partly from a wish to
understand what it was to be ‘a student’ (itself part of a self-objectification of academic
life). It is important that there is a particular phenomenon, or research question, at the
point of initiation in Bourdieu’s work – not a theoretical motive. He says so quite
explicitly on several occasions, and in the Foreward to Reproduction (1977/70: xviii)
goes out of his way to insist that, although the book is divided into two part – the first
theoretical, and the second empirical – really their provenance should be understood as
being the other way around, from practice to theory; in other words, to come up with a
set of propositions for the research which were ‘logically required as a ground for its
findings’.
Secondly, Bourdieu is looking to break with the ‘pre-given’ or ‘pre-constructed’. In his
very first publication on Algeria (1958), he begins by arguing that ‘Algeria’ itself is a
social construct, which first needs to be understood in terms of its actuality rather than
any historical accumulation of meaning. What follows amounts to a social topography of
the morphology of Algerian society. Similarly, with respect to education, he addresses
the ‘common sense’ view of democratic schooling, so centrally cherished and upheld by
successive political establishments within the French Republic after its foundation by
the Jacobins (see Bourdieu 1966). This preoccupation with the ‘social construction’ of
social ‘facts’ was to preoccupy him for the rest of his career. For example, even in 1990,
in response to a letter from sixth-form students requesting support for the ‘lycée
movement’ he begins with asserting that he refuses to speak of ‘lycée students’ in
general as this is an ‘abuse of language’ (2008/02: 181). They are not a homogenous
entity but a diverse collectivity. The point is more than semantics, rather one of
philosophy and methodology. Bourdieu describes his own ‘epiphanic moment’ when he
saw that, in order to proceed in the social science,s it was necessary to look at the total
structure of the social space, not a ‘representative’ sample (see Bourdieu and Grenfell,
1995). But, this moment only came as part his empirical experiences in Algeria and the
Béarn, viewed in the light of his own philosophical background and readings of the
founding fathers of sociology.
There is a third practical point emerging from this discussion. That Bourdieu’s own
empirical and academic experience was mounted against a background of intense
intellectual debate in the immediate post-war period. Existentialism and Structuralism
where the dominant trends and both were came under the influence of Soviet Marxism
and Communist theory in a climate which sought to establish an alternative to both
Fascism and Capitalism. It is clear that Bourdieu was active in dialogues with various
groups and individuals; for example, his involvement with conferences such as the
‘Week of Marxist Thought’ (9-15 March 1966) and the Cercle Noroit (June 1965). The
latter set out to address issues surrounding the social transformations which had taken
place in France and elsewhere since the Second World War; in particular, the unequal
distribution of profits and sharing which had resulted in these changes.
Much of this debate was conducted in the (pre-constructed) terms of the day; of which
those of race and social class were amongst the most dominant. Bourdieu too adopts a
conventional rubric – working class, middle class, upper class – as a working model to
group findings emerging from his analysis of data collected on education and culture
(for example, in Reproduction (op. cit.) and The Love of Art, 1990/66). Just as, in the
same way, he had, in 1963, attempted a description of the social structure of Algerian
society in classic Marxist terms: sub-proletariat, proletariat, semi-proletariat, traditional
bourgeoisie, new bourgeoisie (p. 383). However, I would argue that behind all of these
accounts lay super-ordinate concerns to account for social systems as a
multidimensional space that required both statistical and ethnographic analyses.
Change, its medium and process, was central to this concern, as was the desire to show
up the mechanisms of various social phenomena (education, culture, religion, etc.) in
contributing to the evolution of French society. It is out of these practical concerns,
rather than theoretical opposition to dominant paradigms, that Bourdieu began to
develop his own conceptual tools of analysis: for example, habitus, field, capital, etc. But,
again, these did not emerge deductively, but as a way of accounting for what was seen in
the empirical data collected and analysed:
…the concept of habitus which was developed as part of an attempt to account for
the practices of men and women who found themselves thrown into a strange and
foreign cosmos imposed by colonialism, with cultural equipment and dispositions
– particularly economic dispositions – acquired in a pre-capitalist world; the
concept of cultural capital which, being elaborated and deployed at more or less
the same time as Gary Becker was putting into circulation the vague and flabby
notion of ‘human capital’ ( a notion heavily laden with sociologically unacceptable
assumptions), was intended to account for otherwise inexplicable differences in
academic performance with children of unequal cultural patrimonies and, more
generally, in all kinds of cultural or economic practices; the concept of social
capital which I had developed, from my earliest ethnographical work in Kabylia or
Béarn, to account for residual differences, linked, broadly speaking, to the
resources which can be brought together per procurationem through the networks
of ‘relations’ of various sizes and differing density…; the concept of symbolic
capital, which I had to construct to explain the logic of the economy of honour and
‘good faith’ and which I have been able to clarify and refine in, by and for the
analysis of the economy of symbolic goods, particularly of works of art; and lastly,
and most importantly, the concept of field, which has met with some success….The
introduction of these notions is merely one aspect of a more general shift of
language (marked, for example, by the substitution of the lexicon of dispositions
for the language of decision making, or of the term ‘reasonable’ for ‘rational’),
which is essential to express a view of action radically different from that which –
most often implicitly – underlies neoclassical theory.
(2005/00: 2)
The point I am making is that Bourdieu’s interest in ‘social class’ was secondary. The
photos of the Algerian street sellers show individuals who have no class, as such. The
important questions about them are more ethnographic: who are they? Why are they
there? The photos of the Béarnais peasants show individuals who are all of the same
class – they are peasants. However, here, there are important questions about how
differentiation occurs and why. What are the structures that operate to exclude a certain
group from matrimony. The methodological point is that it is in response to question
like these that Bourdieu developed concepts such as field, habitus and capital. It was not
an attempt to provide a theory of ‘social class’, more an explanation of individual
trajectory and change in society.
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Bourdieu and Social Class – ‘Classifying’ Society
Bourdieu’s view of ‘social class’ is both philosophical and methodological, and ultimately
political: But, unfolding in the course of his intellectual development. It is as well to
recall that for Bourdieu, the primary act is one of cognition; that is an individual
engaging in their social (material and ideational) environment. The response of social
agents is both empirical and naïve at source, but increasingly conditioned by the pregiven, what has been experienced before. That internalisation, for Bourdieu, is both
mental and corporeal – embedded in the being of social agents. Bourdieu is seeking to
‘break’ with that empirical state in disclosing the meaning of social action. However, that
break is mounted in terms of further ‘breaks’ from different forms of knowledge derived
from the philosophical field; namely, subjectivist and objectivist knowledge (see Grenfell
and James, 1998: Chapter 2; and Grenfell, 2004: 174ff for further discussion). Bourdieu
sees this dichotomy to be ‘fundamental’ and ‘ruinous’ (1990/80: 25ff). On the one side,
is the ‘objective mode’ with its representations of reality as things to be thrown into
sharp relief. On the other, is the ‘subjective mode’, where agents manipulate their selfimage in presenting themselves to a world that is experienced as a series of spontaneous
events. Bourdieu places Marx and Durkheim on the objective side, and Schütz and
phenomenology on the subjective side (1987/90: 124ff). This issue is central to
Bourdieu’s thinking since, in effect, it represents a struggle over our very perceptions of
the social world. A struggle in which the ‘truth is at stake’. Methodologically, the
dichotomy is played out in terms of two approaches: one substantialist, the other
relational. The substantialist approach treats things as pre-existing entities, with
essential properties – as realist objects; whilst the relationalist approach understand
things in terms of their relational context – how they acquire sense in terms of their
position with respect to other phenomena which share their context (see Bourdieu,
1998: 3-6). In terms of the present discussion, this leads to a fundamental question: ‘Are
classes a scientific construct or do they exist?’ In terms of the substantialist mode of
knowledge, they are ‘ready-made’ generators of social practice. The action of social
agents is therefore reduced to being a product of their membership of certain social
groups identified by the researchers. Whilst the relational mode sees classes in terms of
invisible relationships which are actualised at any given moment. The power of social
classes is that they are ‘misrecognised’ as such. What is seen in terms of social class does
not exist; while what is not seen does. No-one knows really when and where one class
end and another begins and, in reality, any one individual may exist in a number of
‘classes’ throughout their life without ever belonging to any of them. For Bourdieu, ‘the
real’ is relational because reality is nothing other than structure, a set of relationships,
‘obscured by the realities of ordinary sense-experience (Bourdieu, 1987: 3). This
relational reading of Bourdieu’s work is fundamental to grasping what he is in fact
offering in his ‘class-based’ analyses:
It is because the analyses reported in Distinction are read in a realist and
substantialist way (as opposed to a relational one) – thus assigning directly this or
that property or practice to a ‘class’, playing soccer or drinking pastis to workers,
playing golf or drinking champagne to the traditional grande bourgeoisie – that I
am taken to task for overlooking the specific logic and autonomy of the symbolic
order, thereby reduced to a mere reflection of the social order. (In other words,
once again, the charge of reductionalism thrown at me is based on a reductionist
reading of my analyses.
(Bourdieu, 1990/87: 113)
So, what is Bourdieu doing that is different? Instead of attributing particular practices to
particular classes, Bourdieu’s intent is to construct a model of the social space which
accounts for a set of practices found there. These practices differentiate themselves
according to observed differences based on the principles defining position in the social
space. What is at issue here is not so much the similarities that classes share, but their
differences; we need to ‘construct social space in order to allow for the prediction of the
largest possible number of differences’ (1994/87: 3). What he offers is therefore less a
sociology of ‘social class’ than a sociology of distinction, its defining logic of practice, and
social classification. Here, acknowledgement that ‘distinction’ is a basic human instinct
is not enough. Bourdieu takes exception with Veblen’s view of ‘conspicuous
consumption’: it is not enough to be conspicuous, but to be noticed in terms of a specific
sign of signification. Classes only exist, therefore, to the extent to which they are
acknowledged as such in practical contexts governed by the particular principles of
their position in the social space. The purpose of sociology is to indicate the processes
and consequences of that acknowledgement. Anything else is to confuse the ‘things of
logic with the logic of things’ (ibid.: 117). Naming a class, without this view, is
tantamount to an insult as it acts as a form of ‘symbolic violence’ in imposing a certain
(absolute) perspectivism.
In researching social classification, Bourdieu is therefore drawing a distinction between
the actual structure of the social system in its multidimensional stratification, and the
symbolic products which arise from it: ‘In reality, the space of symbolic stances and the
space of social positions are two independent, but homologous, spaces’ (ibid.: 113).
Bourdieu describes his method as attempting to reconstruct the space of differences, or
differential positions, and only then accounting for these positions as differential
properties of the social space. Such properties are eventually defined in terms of capital:
in other words, what is symbolically valued. Regions are then ‘cut up’ to see the
operation and placing of a range of social groupings. These groupings may be of any
kind – race, gender – although, at least in his work in education and culture, occupation
was a major classifier: but names and clusters of occupations defined in terms of criteria
and affinities, and the way they were distributed across the range of occupational
categories.
Bourdieu further argues that in his empirical studies, the major ‘primary’ principles of
differentiation could be attributed to both the volume and the particular configuration of
(cultural, social and economic) capital. In other words, individuals and groups define
themselves by how much capital they hold and the balance of capital types within that
holding. A further point is the social trajectories of individuals and groups. This is a way
of relating social classes ‘on paper’ with what exists in reality. To the extent to which
various individuals hold similar capital volumes and capital configurations (i.e., share
material conditions) in conjunction with others, they will constitute a homogeneous,
and thus identifiable, group. In other words, they share a similar position in the overall
structure of the social space, and thus also share similar habitus and consequent
dispositional characteristics.
Social classes therefore do not exist. What exists is ‘social space’ and virtual classes
defined in terms of particular activities within it.
Further Methodological Points
The issue of ‘social class’ and how they are defined, therefore, goes to the heart of
Bourdieu philosophy and method. He is struggling not to substantiate ‘classes’ in a field
in which its modus operandi include a struggle for philosophical and methodological
saliency. ‘To name’ something is tantamount to an act of magic since, if accepted, it
allows for one view to take precedence over another, itself a form of ‘symbolic violence’.
Classificatory strategies mark an ambition to accept or modify a certain world view:
Capitalist? Marxist? Bourdieusian? Therefore, we should beware of researchers who
pass over the relational aspect of ‘classes on paper’, and be aware further of their virtual
aspect. Yet, this is exactly what does happen, Bourdieu argues, in fields where certain
agents (with their own objective interests) assign members to certain categories. These
agents may exist in the political, media or academic fields. However, in each case, there
is an issue of ‘legitimacy’ in the naming of others. This argument moves Bourdieu to a
view of taking the actual process of ‘classes’ and ‘classification’ as an object of study:
‘one cannot establish a science of classifications without establishing a science of the
struggle over classifications and without taking into account the positions occupied in
this struggle for the power of knowledge’ (1991: 241). The point here is that Bourdieu is
arguing that certain agents, or groups, have power over others in their assigning of class
definitions. The power to do this is almost a ‘sacred’ act as it separates social groups –
the elite and the masses - good and evil, distinguished and vulgar, and is therefore
inherently political: ‘Analysis of the struggle of classifications brings to light the political
ambition which haunts the gnoseological ambition to produce the correct classification’
(ibid: 243).This is understandable for the dominant, with an interest in preserving the
status quo and the social space as it is commonly conceived. It is not acceptable for a
‘science’ aimed at discovering the reality of class. Ultimately, therefore, this discussion
moves us towards methodological issues of practice - to avoid reifying class and to
objectify the very ambition to objectify classes itself. I now want to address some
methodological details before returning to issues of class as a political representation
3 Level Methodology
The Construction of the Research Object
At one point, Bourdieu refers to the ‘construction of the research object’ as ‘summum
of the art’ of social science research (1989: 51). As researchers, our choice of research
topic is shaped by our own academic backgrounds and trajectories. To this extent, our
research activity is a symbolic homology of the academic infrastructure with its
various structural positions and groupings. Key concepts in the social sciences are
subject to intense argument about the terms of their representation. For example, the
‘elderly’, ‘young’, immigrants’, poverty’, ‘classroom’ etc. Bourdieu warns the wouldbe researcher to ‘beware of words’: Beware of them because words present
themselves as if they are value-neutral, whilst in effect they are socio-historical
constructions, taken-for-granted as expressions of ‘common sense’, but with specialist
assumptions about their meanings and imbued with logically practical implications of
such meanings. In practice, words are susceptible to a kind of ‘double historicisation’:
firstly, a word is used to represent a certain phenomenon at a particular point in time –
one which is often constructed and presented in a way which renders as transparent
the social and historical aspects of its construction; secondly, that dehistoricised form
is then subject to further historicisation, as the original form is taken as the basis of
fact from which further work and elaboration is operationalised. In this way, the most
innocent word can carry within it a whole set of un-objectified assumptions, interests,
and meanings which confuse the reality of representation with the representation of
reality. To confuse ‘substantialist’ and ‘relational’ thinking: in effect, it is so easy to
(miss)take constructs as things in themselves rather than as sets of relations. To do
one rather than the other – without knowing about it, still less acknowledging it - is to
accept a whole epistemological matrix which has direct consequences for the way that
an object of research is thought about, with the implications this error entails for the
methodologies employed to collect and analyse data, and for the conclusions drawn as
a consequence. Bourdieu offers the example of the word ‘profession’, making the
point that as soon as it is taken as an instrument, rather than an object of analysis, a
whole set of consequences follows. Moreover, such assumptions are not merely an
innocent oversight, since one modus operandi necessary sets itself against another in a
field competing for the limited symbolic capital that can be accrued from occupying a
dominant position within it. This is no less true of the scientific field. All of which
raises questions about the value, power and integrity of a word itself for representing
both a product and process. Different factions of the academic field as an element in
their struggles for dominant field positions. Many simply do not recognise the
contested nature of ‘concepts’. To this extent, the ‘construction of the research object’
is often the most difficult methodological stage to undertake: firstly, because, its
terms – the names of the game – are the product of history, and therefore have
developed a certain ‘taken-for-granted’ orthodoxy; secondly, because a whole set of
specific interests are often co-terminus with seeing the world in this way. Bourdieu
argues that to break from these risks ‘relegating to the past’ a whole set of thinking,
hierarchically established by the history and consequent structure of the science field
itself (Bourdieu, 1996/92: 160). Jobs might literally be lost, careers ruined, etc.!
What Bourdieu argues for is a combination of ‘immense theoretical ambition’ and
‘extreme empirical modesty’; the constitution of ‘socially insignificant objects’ into
‘scientific objects’; and the translation of ‘very abstract problems’ into ‘concrete
scientific operations’ (1989: 51).
‘The construction of the research object – at least in my personal research experience
– is not something that is effected once and for all, with one stroke, through a sort of
inaugural theoretical act…it is a protracted and exacting task that is accomplished
little by little through a whole series of rectifications and amendments…that is, by a
set of practical principles that orients choices at once minute and decisive….one of
the main difficulties of relational analysis is that, most of the time, social spaces can
be grasped only in the form of distributions of properties among individuals or
concrete institutions since the data available are attached to individuals or
institutions…
Use square-table of pertinent properties of a set of agents or institutions: Enter each
(agent or institution) on a line and create a new column each time a property
necessary to characterise one set of them is identified. This is obliges the researcher to
question all other agents or institutions on the presence or absence of this property.
This may be done at an initial, inductive stage of locating. Then, pick out
redundancies and eliminate columns devoted to structurally or functionally
equivalents so as to retain all traits – and only these – that are capable of
disciminating between the different agents or institutions – thereby analytically
relevant. This makes you think relationally – both of social units under consideration
and their properties which can be characterised in terms of presence and absence
(yes/no) or gradually (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
2) Field Analysis
A 3-level Approach to Studying the Field of the Object of Research
When asked explicitly by Loïc Wacquant (1992a: 104-7) to sum up this
methodological approach, Bourdieu described it in terms of three distinct
levels (see also chapter 5):
1. Analyse the position of the field vis-à-vis the field of power;
2. Map out the objective structure of relations between the positions
occupied by agents who compete for the legitimate forms of specific
authority of which the field is a site;
3. Analyze the habitus of agents; the systems of dispositions they have
acquired by internalizing a deterministic type of social and economic
condition.
It is possible to see how these three levels represent the various strata of
interaction between habitus and field.
In level one, it is necessary to look at a field in relationship to other fields; in
particular the recognised field of power. Ultimately, this is political power and
government; although there are a number of mediating institutions and fields:
royalty, international business, etc.
In level two, the structural topography of the field itself is considered: all those
within it and the positions they hold. This positioning is expressed in terms of
capital and its configurations. Capital can be expressed in terms of three forms:
economic, social and cultural. Economic refers to money wealth; Social to useful
or prestigious network relations; and Cultural to symbolically powerful cultural
attributes derived from education, family background and possessions. They are
all capital because they act to ‘buy’ positioning within the field. Capital therefore
has value derived from the field as the recognised, acknowledged and attributed
currency of exchange for the field so that it is able to organise itself and position
those within it according to its defining principles. The generating principles of a
field have a logic of practice, a common currency expressed through the medium
of its capital. It defines what is and is not thinkable and what is do-able within
the field by systems of recognising, or not, which give differential value
according to principles of scarcity and rarity. In other words, that which is most
valued is most rare and thus sought after and therefore valuable; that which is
most common is of least value.
In level three, the actual individual agent within the field is analysed; their
background, trajectory and positioning. This level is expressed in terms of
individual features of the characteristics of individuals, but only in so far as they
relate to the field, past and present. In other words, we are interested in how
particular attributes, which are social in as much as they only have value in
terms of the field as a whole. We are not concerned with individual
idiosyncrasies. Habitus then directs and positions individuals in the field in terms
of the capital configuration they possess and how this resonates, or not, with the
ruling principles of logic of the field. We can then compare individuals, groups
and the way structures intersect and resonate in the homologies set up in the
course of the operations of this field with other fields. For educational research,
this implies greater attention being given to such aspects as biography,
trajectory (life and professional) and site practice with respect to the logic of
practice of fields in which they occur. The structure of fields, their defining logic,
derivation, and the way such logics are actualised in practice are important;
especially those of official discourses, etc. Finally, it is the links between
individuals (habitus), field structures, and the positionings both within and
between fields which form a conceptual framework for educational research (see
Grenfell, 1996 for an application of this three level analysis to the area of teacher
education; and Grenfell and Hardy, 2007 to the study of art and educational
aesthetics).
Of course, there is a question about whether the researcher begins with level 1, 2
or level 3. In a sense, data collection possibly presupposes an initial gathering of
personal – habitus – accounts (level 3) as a way of building up an ethnography of
field participants. However, it must be stressed that biographical data are not
enough on their own. They also need to be analysed with respect to field
positions, structures, and their underlying logic of practice. And, most
importantly the relationship between field and habtitus - not just the one and/ or
the other. Finally, that field analysis, and its interactions with individual habitus,
needs to be connected with a further analysis of the relations between the field
and its position in the overall structures of fields of power. All three levels are
then needed.
In order to construct such a field analysis, the issue of the traditional dichotomy
between qualitative and quantitative approaches become less significant. Indeed,
the researcher needs to obtain the best date analyses to undertake the
construction of a relational analysis; both within and between fields. This may be
Multiple Correspondence Analysis; documentary analysis; biographical studies;
ethnographic case studies; etc.
What this 3-level analysis amounts to in effect is a methodological application of
a ‘theory of situatedness’ or ‘existential analytics’. Bourdieu did, however,
anticipate criticism:
The questioning of objectivism is liable to be understood at first as a
rehabilitation of subjectivism and to be merged with the critique that
naïve humanism levels at scientific objectification in the name of ‘lived
experience’ and the rights of ‘subjectivity’.
(1977b/72: 4).
However, he argued that such an approach was absolutely essential if we are to
free ourselves of the mistakes of the past and ‘to escape from the ritual either/or
choice between objectivism and subjectivism’ (ibid.). Bourdieu's way of doing
this was expressed in terms of this playing back and forth between habitus and
field.
For Bourdieu, any theoretical view of the world, by the specialist or nonspecialist, involved a symbolic assertion of truth in the struggle for legitimation;
that is, for recognition of authenticity. This is why any theory of knowledge for
Bourdieu had to be both ontological and political, since it represented a
particular world-view or, raison d'être, together with the latent interests
presented there. What Bourdieu's theory of practice is attempting to do is to look
at the logic of these 'points of view' in terms of the epistemological
complementarity of objective structures and cognitive structures - but to do so in
a way which applies the same epistemological approach to the
researcher/philosopher as to the researched/ theory of knowledge. It is one
thing to make sense of practical action and knowledge in this way, it is another to
make sense of this making of sense.
Symbolic and Actual
DIAGRAM
Bourdieu’s approach to investigating the social world is essentially empirical, in
which he saw its relational and dynamic nature. Here, at a particular time and place,
the changing structures and institutions of the social world are analysed (an external
objective reading) at the same time as the nature and extent of individuals’
participation in it (an internal subjective reading). These two distinct social logics are
inter-penetrating and mutually generating, giving rise to ‘structured’ and ‘structuring
structures’. In Reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970, p ix). Indeed, Bourdieu
distinguishes between a theorist’s viewpoint and a researcher’s viewpoint: A theorist
is interested in developing hypotheses to account for the particularities and
functioning of an object of study (a move from ‘Practice’ to Justifying Educational
Principles on the left hand side of triangle), whereas a researcher collects empirical
data and analyses it in order to obtain a picture of how the ‘real world’ is constituted.
Either of these viewpoints gives only a partial view if used alone. Bourdieu’s
approach does both, and more. His approach to the study of a social object can be
described most simply as an on-going and reflexive interplay between the two
positions – empirical investigation and theoretical explanation. In place of continued
separation between the two positions, mitigated only by intensified interactions,
Bourdieu advocates the fusion of theoretical construction and practical research
operations – a theory of practice, which is at one and the same time a practice of
theory. Bourdieu, however, goes still further, arguing against simply adopting a
scholastic view (from a distance). He sees the necessity for a return to practice and to
the social world. Here, modes of thinking are necessary to understanding an object of
study in relation to its field context and to the interests and positioning of the
researchers themselves.
The world is infinitely complex. Any ethnographer struggles with representing that
complexity. Faced with the multidimensionality, there seems to be a choice between
two primary ways of tackling it. As noted above, the ‘theoretical’ approach held to be
most robust and ‘scientific’ seeks to extract, simplify, and hypothesise on the basis of
findings which can then be tested against further data analyses. However, a
Bourdieusian approach to ethnography takes a different course; one which begins
with the totality, accepts the complexity and seeks organising structures within it and
their underlying generated principles. The logic of such principles is always to
differentiate, but they do express themselves in different terms. In this way, the
principles can be functionally operative at the same time as being misrecognised: if
they were not, they would not be as effective. The whole of Bourdieu’s conceptual
universe – his theory of practice and the terms in which it is expressed (Habitus,
Field, Capital, Disposition, Interest, Doxa, etc.) – is predicated on this epistemological
stance. However, it is a stance with practical implications. For example, social
sciences sometimes use the concept of ‘social class’ as a primary classifier of social
practice and outcomes. So, data is collected and similarities are grouped together
under the social provenance of the individuals involved. A Bourdieusian approach is
different in a way, one which is both more subtle and fundamental. In the common
practice of sociology described, ‘social class’ becomes a pre-existing, independent
variable. However, Bourdieu’s intention was rather to construct a model of the social
space, which accounts for a set of practices found there. These practices were to be
seen as differentiating themselves according to observed differences based on the
principles defining position in that social space. So, ‘social classes’ were a result of
analyses. What is at issue here is not so much the similarities that classes share, but
the differences between different classes. For Bourdieu, what we must do is ‘construct
social space in order to allow for the prediction of the largest possible number of
differences’ (1990d/87: 3). What this results in therefore is less an account of ‘social
class’ than a ‘sociology of distinction’ and differentiation, including its defining logic
of practice and consequent social classification. A simple acknowledgement of
‘distinction’ as a basic human instinct is therefore not enough. Indeed, at one point
Bourdieu takes exception with Veblen’s view of ‘conspicuous consumption’. For
Bourdieu, it is not enough to understand consumers simply as needing to be
conspicuous. Rather, it is necessary for individuals to be noticed in terms of specific
signs of signification within a specific field at a particular place and time. Noticeably,
in education,students are often symbolically rich in their own terms whilst at the same
seeming to be impoverished according to classroom language orthodoxies only be
valued from within.
Social class is a useful example since, from a Bourdieusian perspective, they only
exist to the extent to which they are acknowledged as such in practical contexts
governed by the particular principles of their position in the social space. But, the
same argument can be applied to any ethnographic classifier
Multiple Correspondence Analysis
‘…concepts have no definition other that systemic ones, and are put to work
empirically in systematic fashion. Such notions as habitus, field, and capital can be
defined, but only within the theoretical system they constitute, not in
isolation…Science admits on systems of laws…And what is true of concepts is
true of relations, which acquire their meaning only within a system of
relations…If I make extensive use of correspondence analysis, in preference to
multivariate regression, for instance, it is because correspondence analysis is a
relational technique of data analysis whose philosophy corresponds exactly to
what, in my view, the reality of the social world is. It is a technique which ‘thinks’
in terms of relation, as I try to do precisely in terms of field. (1992: 96)
3) Participant Objectivation
In a sense, the main conviction behind a Bourdieusian approach to classroom
language ethnography is not simply that in our normal operative state the world – in
this case the language classroom – is not so much more complicated than we think,
but that it is more complicated than we can think. The thinking tools that Bourdieu’s
method provides are intended as a way of opening up that complexity in order to
provide new insights. However, it would be a mistake to consider the deployment of
terms like habitus, field and capital as an end in itself, or that simply expressing data
analysis with these words was a sufficient route to understanding and explanation. At
its extreme, such an approach can result in little more than a metaphorising of data
with Bourdieusian language. The 3-level approach to data analysis outlined above is
intended to be a key to avoiding such a reification of conceptual terms. However,
there is a third vital ingredient for Bourdieu: Reflexivity. We find it everywhere in his
writing, but what are its practical implications for classroom language ethnography?
The whole focus on the construction of the research object we have discussed here is
that it is partly an attempt to break with the ‘pre-given’ of the world, especially the
academic one, and to re-think language and language pedagogy in a new way. As part
of this process, reflexivity is more than a pragmatic option; it is rather an
epistemological necessity. As we saw in diagram 10.1, what Bourdieu is proposing is
to break from ‘scholastic knowledge’ itself! In other words, the scholastic world of
theory about language teaching and learning needs to be seen as being just as prone as
the empirical world of language classrooms to acting on the basis of presuppositions
created historically; so much so that there is indeed the danger of research knowledge
becoming a kind of ‘scholastic fallacy’, where what is offered in the name of
scientific knowledge is in actuality simply the reproduction of a certain scholastic
relation to the world, and one indeed imbibed with its own interests. Bourdieu writes
of three presuppositions which are key dangers in this potential ‘misrepresentation’
(see Bourdieu, 2000/ 97: 10). Firstly, there is the presupposition associated with a
particular position in the social space; in other words, the particular habitus (including
gender) as constituted by a particular life trajectory, and thus the cognitive structures
which orientate thought and practice. Secondly, there is the orthodoxy of the
particular site of the field of language pedagogy itself – its doxa – with its imperative
to think (only!) in these terms, as they are the only ones acknowledged as legitimate
in the field. Thirdly, there is the whole relation to the social world implied by
scholastic skholè itself; in other words, to see the former as substantive, given, and an
object of contemplation rather than relationally – praxeologically - and existentially
dynamic. Finally, therefore, in order to break from scholastic reason itself, it is, for
Bourdieu, not sufficient simply to be aware through some form of return of thought to
thought itself. Such actions are for him a part of the same scholastic fantasy that
believes that thought can transcend thought and, in so doing, escape from all the
socio-culturally constructed presuppositions listed above. Because these
presuppositions are unconscious, implied and occluded in the very nature of thought
itself, it is necessary to find another means to escape from them than the type of
reflexivity commonly accepted by social scientists (for example, Alvin Gouldner).
For Bourdieu, the necessary alternative is through a process of ‘participant
objectivation’, or the ‘objectification of the objectifying subject’:
I mean by that the one that dispossesses the knowing subject of the privilege it
normally grants itself and that deploys all available instruments of
objectification…in order to bring to light the presuppositions it owes to its
inclusion in the object of knowledge.
(ibid.).
Social scientists, language researchers or classroom ethnographers are called on to
apply the same methods of analysis to themselves as to their object of research. What
this means, in effect, is to see their own research field in terms of habitus, field and
capital, and to objectify their own position within it. Bourdieu attempted such a
procedure in books such as Homo Academicus (1988/84) and Sketch for a Selfanalysis (2004). However, one point is crucially clear: Although this undertaking can
be attempted on an individual basis, and is partly necessitated by a personal
epistemological imperative, what is even more important is that participants in a
particular academic field, here language education, commit themselves to a similar
process of reflexivity as a way of showing up the limits of its science. Bourdieu is
perfectly aware that such an activity runs counter to the conventional underlying logic
of practice of the scientific field, with its interest in asserting its own worldview in
competing for a dominant position in the academic field overall. As a result of the
latter, there is often a reluctance on the part of academics to recognise and
acknowledge the limits of thinking that a truly reflexive process would reveal. For
Bourdieu, it is the particular mission of sociology – or at least his version of sociology
– to insist on this reflexive stance. Indeed, anything else is a kind of ultimate act of
scholastic bad faith.
Why do it?
Questions
1. Nature of Structure?
2. Nature and Form of Relations?
3. Theory?
4. Macro v. Micro (Field and Habitus)?
5. Field and sub-field (Microcosms)?
6. Links between levels?
7. Language of constructions?
8. Constructions of Research Object?
9. Participant Objectivation?